I just finished reading The City We Became by NK Jamison. And it’s, among many things, a celebration of the diversity of New York and the importance of the variety of New York and its boroughs.
Cover of The City We Became by N. K. Jamison—a visual depiction of the city elsewhere.
The metaphor of the city giving birth to a living, breathing entity that destroys other universes as it gets created is a metaphor for how to be a New Yorker is to be something new, where your old identity gets erased, and a new composite one gets created.
That the power of that identity is more significant than any particular identity you used to have.
Having listened to the book as an audiobook and heard from others that the written text is not that compelling, my thoughts are the following. What makes the book clear is its integration into New York. And when you hear Ayslen talk like someone from Staten Island, a very particular kind of person, or Branca like the Bronx, it changes how the book sounds and feels. If you can hear those voices when you read, then read; if you can’t – I strongly recommend the audiobook narration by Robin Miles.
My favorite throwaway scene is her depiction of Starbucks as a parasite whose purpose is to destroy cities by destroying their diversity. I cracked up laughing hard when I read that.
So I just finished reading the Federalists. And it’s a fantastic text. A virtuoso explanation of why the Constitution is the way it is.
I wish I wish I had read this 30 years ago.
I do recommend the audiobook. The problem with the text is that it is over 200 years old and feels weird to read. But when read aloud, it just flows.
This particular narration is fantastic.
What struck me about this book is how hard the founders worked to create a system that would make it hard for a single faction to impose their vision of the Union on the other.
What also struck me is why Abraham Lincoln fought for the Union. I thought of it as a particular opinion of an intellectual. But reading the federalists, it’s clear that the Union was correctly perceived as necessary for freedom. If you compare the fate of Central America t that of North America, the value of a single all-encompassing federal state that can guarantee the safety of the individual states becomes obvious.
Like any piece of fiction, the book Winter Work: A Novel captures the essence of the end of times, the duplicity of spies, and the imagined feeling of East Germany.
The dialogue isn’t that great. There are times when it’s cringeworthy, especially when Americans talk about intra-office politics. That was horrible.
However, the dialogue between Emil, Karola, and Claire is fantastic.
The descriptions of the forest, the restaurants, and the settings are impeccable. I felt like I was in East Germany, which had just joined the west.
I will observe that the protagonist is that particular kind of German protagonist who is deeply flawed and trying to fit in.
Jack Ryan as Han Solo and Ukraine are really the themes of Season 3
I just finished Season 3 of Jack Ryan. And I will provide spoilers. So stop.
The central conceit of the season is that a secret cabal within the Russian government wants to reestablish the USSR. What the show does extraordinarily well shows the cabal’s motivations. Motivations that are not cartoonish but very real. Motivations that have led to a war in Ukraine.
The show was shot in 2021, and when Ukraine was invaded, I am certain the producers were saying, “fuck-ity-fuck-fuck.”
But they released it anyway. And although I don’t know how many scenes were reshot, as the show does an extraordinary job of articulating the why of the invasion of Ukraine. The why so many older Russians are attracted to the idea of a war of conquest.
The end of the USSR was a traumatic experience. For many people who had devoted their lives to the system, the end was a massive and protracted layoff. Their identity, sense of worth, and place in the world were shattered.
Like Andor, in Star Wars: Rogue One, they had done horrible things in the name of the Revolution. And those things were justified because of the revolution. And now it was over. And all of those terrible things were now just terrible things.
There are several excellent scenes in the show.
The first is Petr Kovac explaining the loss of power his father felt. That the end of the USSR meant he was no longer feared and had become a joke. Losing power, losing control, and terrifying and wanting it back are all normal human reactions.
The second is the interaction between Alena Kovac and Alexei Petrov. The rogue defense minister of Russia does an excellent job articulating the venom and contempt that Putin articulated towards Ukraine. He saw Czechs not as a free people but as a thing to be crushed.
The third is Luka Gocharov’s speech on the past. As a Greek, who experienced the silence of the Greek Civil War, it was eerie. The events of the past didn’t happen. They didn’t exist. And yet they motivated actions and horrors and hates of the present. In Russia, the unwillingness to confront the imperialist past and the crimes in the name of the imperial past means they continue to practice those crimes.
The fourth is the flashbacks from the Sokol Massacre in 1969. Everyone has a different understanding of the events. For Luka, it’s a shame and horror of the act. For Petr, it is a sense of betrayal from the rulers of Russia. When the USSR collapses, he sees the last betrayal of the ruling elite of those who suffered and died.
The NAZI regime, the Putin Regime, and Greek Junta are regimes of corporals and colonels. Men who took orders and felt that they had been betrayed by those who led them. And so they did what they did, seize power to make better decisions. To reverse the mistakes others made.
The NAZIs started a war that destroyed Europe. Putin started a war that has destroyed Ukraine. And the Greek Junta started a war that partitioned Cyprus.
Jack Ryan’s screenwriters are to be commended for doing such an amazing job.
In an earlier post, I talked about how the Federalist Papers argued that a standing army, the size of the United States, and the nature of Freedom made the imposition of a dictatorship impossible. And Andor makes that point in a very compelling way. As it tries to enforce its dictates, the overstretched Empire cannot because it lacks the controls.
However, Andor’s real contribution is to make Star Wars relevant to a new generation. The Vietnam War was about a colonial power, the United States, using overwhelming force to attempt to impose order on a population.
The Vietnam War is almost 50 years old. And the people who cared and fought and protested that war are slowly dying off. It is no longer a meaningful touchstone.
The Death Star, in many ways, was the manifest expression of those Americans who wanted us to Nuke the North.
It was viewed as a terror weapon, not a legitimate tool—an extravagance.
A large part of the Star Wars canon involves a debate within the Imperial Fleet represented by Grand Admiral Thrawn, who argued against the Death Star in favor of more advanced tie-fighters. And we are led to believe that Thrawn was right. That the Death Star is ridiculous.
And the problem is that because the Death Star is ridiculous, it makes the plot of Star Wars and later episodes 7-9 stupid.
Andor makes this problematic plot device a logical necessity given the nature of Freedom and the Empire. And it does, perhaps unintentionally, demonstrate why the Federalists were right to argue that a standing army was not a threat to the Union.
A standing army can not rule a large country because it is too big. And so either you have the consent of the governed, or your government falls apart.
The Emperor conceived that the ability to instantaneously destroy a planet and the ruthlessness to destroy a world was the solution. He didn’t need a standing army; he needed a gun that could blow up an entire planet. Why? Because he guessed, probably correctly, that the number of people willing to sacrifice their whole world is small.
We would like to believe otherwise, but look at what’s going on in Ukraine. Folks like Elon Musk used their platform to argue that we should sacrifice Ukrainians’ lives to save ourselves. In short, the loss of some freedom is seen as a reasonable tradeoff when confronted with annihilation.
So combine the army with a gun-killing planet, and you have enough power to rule the galaxy.
He learned the hard way that a single gun isn’t good enough. And that’s why he built a fleet of planet-killing guns. A single weapon can be destroyed by luck or misfortune. A fleet cannot. And a fleet can destroy planets depriving any rebellion of the resources they need to build their armies.
In short, the plot device of a death star, then a second death star, then a star killer base, and then a fleet of planet-killing star destroyers isn’t some cheap plot, but the logical conclusion of the nature of imperial power in the galaxy when the populations have had a history of freedom.
What Andor did was reframe the Death Star from the weapon of colonial power to the necessary weapon of a galaxy-spanning empire with insufficient resources to rule every corner of it ruthlessly. In short, like Rogue One, Andor’s writers made Star Wars intellectually rigorous and, in the process, fixed what was, in my mind, just lousy script writing.
Retroactively, this means the Death Star — the most absurd superweapon in science fiction — suddenly feels realistic. The Emperor didn’t have a backup plan for keeping the “local systems in line.” Fear of total planetary annihilation was Palpatine’s only real long-term idea. And, in the end, its overt evil is exactly what brought the Empire down. If the Empire had just continued to scheme in the shadows of a soulless puppet democracy, Palpatine might have stayed in power forever.
So my son watches Andor, and at the very end, he goes – oh, so that’s why the emperor had to create the Death Star. The very nature of the government made it essential.
The death star is the answer to the problem expressed in the Federalist papers about the dangers of a standing army, a central government, and a large country.
The Federalists pointed out that a standing army could never control a country as big as the then United States.
The Federalists argued that if the people valued their freedoms and meaningful freedoms, the country’s size made it impossible for the federal army to impose order. They could conquer but not impose a charge.
And because the Death Star is necessary, the Empire must build a second one. The Empire requires the Death Star because, without one, the Empire is too fragile to exist.
Folks can point to Russia as a counter-example of such a need. But here’s the but, the Russian and Soviet governments had a quasi-federal system that devolved significant autonomy to the edges. Putin and his goons just piggybacked on the system. Only when folks were drafted into the most recent war did any significant resistance emerge to his regime.
![Winter Work: A novel by [Dan Fesperman]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/W/WEBP_402378-T2/images/I/41vkRtSMokL.jpg)
